How Taamy Amaize, Chief Strategy Officer, COLLINS, Injects Creativity into the Furthest Reaches of an Organization
Taamy Amaize ensures her team is always inventing new offerings and ways of working. Image c/o Taamy Amaize.
As COLLINS Chief Strategy Officer, Taamy Amaize has always been passionate about the mechanisms that can strengthen society — from her studies of sociology and economics at NYU to her current role forging a strategic approach to brand creation that comes from a place of responsibility and ethics. She injects creativity into the furthest reaches of an organization, working toward the radical redesign of the American community, and prodding or poking her team members behind the scenes to open up new creative possibilities.
At one dangerous point in our careers, we tend to reach a point of complacency — an intoxication of expertise, Amaize explains. “Hubris is insidious. It will creep in, masking itself as experience and know-how, only to lead you to a destination of lazy thinking,” she says. “There is no amount of preparation that is beneath you, no first impression that you should take for granted.”
Here, she shares some insights, including how she defines strategy; what she has learned from co-founder Brian Collins; and how her understanding of the interdependence of economics and society informs her work.
You incorporate different practices, such as history, psychology, and anthropology into how you work, even if they aren’t directly related to the project. Why?
Design is not what we make. Design is what we make possible.
As an organization and a community of makers, COLLINS creates futures, plural. We conceive and make visible the many possibilities for a company’s future. To do that, we have to widen the aperture of our sources, because “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” (a quote that may/may not be attributed to Mark Twain).
We cannot afford to confine ourselves to the industry or category of our clients. We must consider ourselves a type of pilgrim — journeying to foreign, unexpected times and places in search of expanded meaning. That expanded meaning is often hidden in plain sight, it’s just that most of us are overly focused on the problem at hand to seek its parallels. So we must ask ourselves, “when or where has a problem similar to this been solved?”
In approaching our work in this way, we aim for two things: For our work to feel timeless — based on such fundamental tenets that it feels familiar and true; and for our work to feel timely — so fresh and unexpected within the category that its presence is unignorable.
Your company is inspired by William Gibson’s adage, ‘The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.’ What are 1-2 areas of focus that are in your line of vision that we should all be paying more attention to? And why?
I’m increasingly alarmed by the widening income disparity, both in the U.S. and globally. Income is, of course, simply one barometer for the health and equality of a society, but it’s an important one. I’m even more alarmed by how slow our societies have been to cohesively and systematically address the rapidly growing chasm.
The William Gibson adage often makes me wonder, has our species ever succeeded in evenly distributing ‘the future’? A sobering reality is that as we experience the effects of climate change, the consequences of the future will be unevenly distributed amongst the least powerful, most marginalized in our communities. If that isn’t enough to grab our attention, then recognizing that as a species and a society, we are a whole, interdependent system.
Vulnerabilities at the margins will not stay at the margins. The center will not hold.
What are 1-2 things you’ve learned from co-founder Brian Collins that have led you to think more expansively about a well-discussed topic, or rethink something you thought you knew?
There’s a point that one reaches, seemingly the mid-point of one’s career, characterized by a sense of complacency. An intoxication of expertise. I remember observing it at the start of my career. Me, a wide-eyed twenty-something working with colleagues who were 15+ years in. It seemed like they had encountered every problem, like they’d seen it all before.
I observed how quickly they made assumptions, often the wrong ones. I observed what seemed to me like passivity in the face of opportunity-seeking. That passivity effectively shut down exciting strategic and creative avenues. Worse, it dulled the curiosity and hunger of more junior team members. We were taught the wrong short-cuts. I vowed to never let myself get complacent. And most recently, I remember getting to a point in my career, scared that I had gotten complacent.
I’ve learned so much from Brian, but the most prescient for me is this: Hubris is insidious. It will creep in, masking itself as experience and know-how, only to lead you to a destination of lazy thinking. There is no amount of preparation that is beneath you, no first impression that you should take for granted. He oscillates between the mindsets of Sage and Beginner, seamlessly and humbly.
Recently, he invited me to speak alongside him onstage to a crowd of two thousand people. The morning of the keynote I admitted that I was scared. His response then is now a reminder I hold dear. “You’re scared? Good. That means you’re alert.”
Tell us about your role as Chief Strategy Officer at COLLINS. What are your main responsibilities and remit?
As CSO, I focus on three things. The first is developing strategic talent — working with my strategy team to sharpen our craft, mold and uplift the strategists as leaders in their own right, and helping them push their work to the most creative edges. I do a lot of prodding and provoking from behind the scenes and in the shadows.
Secondly, I work closely with our Chief Creative Officer to ensure that our teams are seamlessly integrated and always inventing new — new offerings, new ways of working. We work very hard to remain experimental and codify our experimental approaches. Lastly, I work with our leadership team to push our own company to the edges — positioning COLLINS to reflect our full capabilities, while simultaneously developing new capabilities that will position us on the frontier of Brand, Design and Transformation.
COLLINS has worked with so many amazing brands. Who are 1-2 on your dream list that you haven’t yet worked with? And what might you want to pursue with them?
My dream list doesn't consist of specific clients or brands, but spaces and opportunities. I feel so passionate about the radical redesign of the American community. As mentioned above, I believe that communities are interdependent, whole systems. And for too long, we have ignored the delicacy of these systems. They need to be redesigned with the most vulnerable in mind, and from multiple perspectives: urban planning, education access, child-care, an increased focus on women’s healthcare, micro-farming in urban environments, etc.
How might we design, develop, and scale a community model, from the ground up? A community that rethinks almost every aspect of how the modern American lives?
Those are some of the questions I not only want to ask, but want all of us to ask, too.
Who would not want to work on that brand?"
“Strategy” is a word we hear a lot. How do you define it? And what makes someone good at a strategic role?
I’ve often heard this phrase that rings particularly true for me and speaks to how I approach strategy: “Strict parents raise creative problem-solvers.”
My dad was incredibly strict growing up, and I happened to have a particularly tenacious spirit. That tenacity, up against rules and constraints, birthed a type of creativity. It forced me to learn how to navigate within his constraints, obediently, while still getting what I wanted. It spurred a shrewd logic, a talent for being resourceful, a keen ability to understand my dad and his rules (so I could negotiate) and a type of creative agility. All these traits primed me for a career in strategy.
On behalf of clients and their objectives, my goal is to see patterns that may have been overlooked, or reconfigure data in a way that opens up new opportunities. For me, being good at a strategic role means being highly perceptive so that I can distinguish between insight and information. Listening to what’s said (and what goes unsaid) in research, or examining culture and trends in such a way that I develop a kind of prescience. Then I need to take that a step further — how can I lead creation from that insight and knowledge? How might I develop rules and guidance stemming from that insight that leads to something extraordinary.
Ultimately, strategy as a practice is a way of perceiving, organizing, creating and guiding.
One of the questions that comes up again and again is, ‘How does a brand measure the Return on Investment of creativity? How do you and your team at COLLINS measure it?’
At COLLINS, creativity manifests in how we approach every one of our disciplines. For example, it is at the heart of our business transformation practice in which we lead clients in the creation of new value, reimagining their business strategies, growth and profit models. Creativity is at the heart of our brand strategy practice in which we aim to craft brand promises that lead to extraordinary design outputs and business outcomes.
I’m much more concerned with measuring the ROI of our impact — our ability to inject creativity into the furthest reaches of an organization — than measuring creativity itself. And I measure that impact through the degree to which a client fully internalizes the work we’ve developed with them. I measure that impact when it becomes impossible to distinguish between work we created for them and work they created themselves. For us, how significantly we’ve changed a company’s way of thinking and the outcomes we’ve made possible for them is the ultimate return on investment.
At NYU, you studied both sociology and economics. How have those two fields influenced and impacted your creative career and strategic approach?
I’ve always been interested in the economic forces acting upon society, and society’s response to those forces. I’ve always been passionate about the mechanisms to strengthen society. In the U.S., those who wield the most power over society are for-profit companies. So the convergence of those two fields coincidentally pointed me towards brand and branding. That understanding of the interdependence between societal and economic forces has led me to forge a strategic approach to brand creation that comes from a place of responsibility. I’m committed to shaping brands who feel responsible towards the communities they serve and will do everything in their power to ethically do so.
If you’d like to read more from Creative Factor, subscribe to our newsletter. Or looking to tell your brand story? Introducing Creative Factor’s Storytelling Studio.
Plus, more great reads right this way…
